221–230 of 687 posts
Here in the UK I know that at least BT broadband modems set up a public Wifi, which is segregated from you own but uses you VDSL link for backhaul. It looks like this is the same thing.
And besides, you can disable the BT 'sharing' capability. May not be so easy with an Echo in the house...
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Are you saying, currently, Apple is better for people concerned with privacy compared to the other big companies?
For now? Yes, because they build their market positioning on this, it's part of their branding. If this changes they will sell all your data without a second thought.
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This. That move is just one step further in removing control. They now have sealed devices that can have who knows what functions but are confined to the network. Next step is to have a concealed upstream. After that they will somehow get a legal mandate to force such devices on you (like the EU did with cars). Maybe they will use smoke detectors or "emergency" services. In the end, this is exactly like in 1984.
Time to invest in companies producing faraday's cages for houses.
I'm using my neighbor's wifi (with his consent). It feels silly that every apartment in a building has its own wifi, I can receive at least 8 wifi networks from my laptop
There are very legitimate reasons for not sharing networks, eg: security, not having latency/throughput issues when others are using the network. And personally I would need a wired connection anyway, so having a wifi network built in to the network switch isn't really a big deal, since the fiber is to the apartment.
Police/Authority: You used the internet to access XXX site You: No, it was the other guy using the wireless...
Edit: Link to TOS: https://www.xfinity.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/HighSpe...
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I’m not sure a parallel can be drawn to the Find My network. That one is purely designed for location tracking in an anonymous way, and does not have the ability to transfer data between devices or any other type of tracking.
You're right but it is pushing their advantage from the phone sector onto another and forcing out their competition in Tile. That sounds to me like monopolistic activity.
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"Dumb TVs" would cost more. It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features. They would cost more because post-sale content sales and advertising generate revenue for TV manufacturers, which they use to subsidise the device sale price, because it's such a competitive, low-margin, market.
I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off. Then again I remember that if commercials weren't successful, TV as we know it would not exist. People gobbling up ads and buying stuff because of that is why ads are still being used after all. After all... https://www.nytimes.com/19…
economies of scale and all that
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I run pihole on my network. I monitored requests made from my tv and blocked the ones to LG one by one.
That’s a great move and I applaud you and also I wonder whether LG would start disabling TVs unable to get their requests through if they noticed a critical mass of them doing that. “We noticed you’re using an ad-blocker” ...
The undesirable outcome is that they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
And the worst case scenario is if they build in 5G connection and take the whole connectivity aspect out of your control.
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> It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features. I'd pay for privacy and control. The other option like I've said is to recycle and mod smart tvs and rewrite their logic so that the user can do wathever he wants. Maybe marketing the modding kits. That would be more akin to those people who install custom open source bios on IBM Thinkpads.
> I'd pay for privacy and control. Then buy a monitor. They have HDMI ports so they can get whatever video feed you need. Some even have speakers.
So I believe there would be a huge price gap between a huge 50"+ monitor and a TV that is more expensive because some extra work on software had to be made.
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I’m not sure a parallel can be drawn to the Find My network. That one is purely designed for location tracking in an anonymous way, and does not have the ability to transfer data between devices or any other type of tracking.
Not yet, but it could have in a future generation, or even a future firmware update.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...
Anything of that sort would be a completely new, unrelated system.